The number of crayons in a Crayola box doubles every 28 years.

What colors have been in said box over the years?




See the full-size version at weathersealed.com

What would be more awesome than a colorful display of iconic images from 100 beloved games?

How about a colorful display of iconic images from 100 beloved games on cupcakes?

I just played this Every Day the Same Dream. Simple, stark, and in places charming. I smiled and thought a little.

I've re-set and cleansed my psyche a bit over the last week or so, delving into a little visual and spatial creativity, rather than the reading and writing (and marking) that I've been doing for the previous few weeks.


While his face is still cartoony, the craggy eyes, puffy cheeks, and red nose all required me to put a level of detail in the face I've never before tried to tackle. Also, because of the extra weight on Santa's frame, he has to waddle a bit and swing his arms on a slightly more complex arc. I'm also fairly pleased with the lighting. There are lights attached to the camera, so when we dolly in for a close-up, some extra lights fill in the shadows on the face.

A couple years ago I created a reindeer in the snow animation.  I had imagined putting the two figures together and making a little scene, but I'm satisfied for now, and I think I'll move on to something else for my free-time project.

Very detailed. See the full version at deviantART (I can't link to it directly).


The site also has a great chart showing how to age characters, and a cool nodally-linked display showing subtle shifts between emotional states, all starting with a neutral face. For example, the face does different things on the blank-relaxed-lazy path, as compared to the blank-relaxed-peaceful path.

Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942." --BoingBoing

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

Jaw-droppingly cool-- though it probably helps if you've ever worked with Flash.

Animator vs. Animation

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku

Any college professor knows the depressing feeling that comes when you stay up late marking a stack of papers, and a high percentage of students don't even bother to pick them up.  One instructor made an art installation out of abandoned student essays. 

As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.


--Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding

I suppose, too, that there's some self-selection involved -- perhaps the students who care least about their writing are the most likely to abandon their essays, while the best writers were proud of their work and wanted to pick it up. A lively discussion on the comments page.

The context in which the students' intellectual property is used -- as evidence of the nation's illiteracy -- is problematic, as is the fact that the students weren't given the opportunity to consent to their work being used this way.

It's hot here in Sacramento.  I got lost wandering the UC-Davis campus looking for the Computers & Writing registration table. I discovered lots of bike paths -- several of them more than once.  I stumbled upon a building with people whom I recognize from various conferences.  There was a nice snack table.  I had helped myself and settled down with a plate before I realized I had walked into the tail end of a workshop session. What was I going to do, put the food back and leave?  That would have been rude.

I found these big metal things near the art building.  I don't know what they are, but I like them.

The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort.  Each artist's work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective.  Here we make, remake, shape and reshape.

• Steve Ersinghaus :: Story
• Carianne Garside :: Painting
• James Revillini :: jQuery
• John Timmons :: Sounds
• Jessica Somers :: Photos
• Neha Bawa :: Poetry
• Mindy Bray :: Photos
• Maggie Ducharme :: Meals
• Susan Ersinghaus :: Suburbs
• Denna Hintze-Yates :: Verbal Image
• Dave Pender :: Drawings

My former student Neha Bawa is among the participants. I have enjoyed learning from the new media pedagogy of Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I'm also particularly interested in James Revillini's scripting experiments.

Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year's Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief "walk-through" that captures the genre's peculiar narrative conventions.

You are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There are several buildings here, including the potter's shop, the pie factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned. (Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via

A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I'm blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill -- something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn't often fit will with millennials who fear losing points for not "getting the right answer" on the first try).

Drawing what you actually see--that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head--is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

While other children were satisfied with their loosely connected conglomerations of orbs and sticks, I saw something that bore little resemblance to its subject. And so, in my own work, I attempted to make the necessary corrections. When that failed, as it inevitably did, I started over. Again and again and again, each time making minor improvements, but all the while still seeing all the many ways that I had failed to persuade my body to produce the correct line or apply the appropriate coloring. -- John Siracusa, Ars Technica

This reminds me of what Robert Heinlein says about being a writer. Paraphrasing: anyone can become a writer, but what's really hard is staying a writer.

The first time I taught a lit crit class at Seton Hill, students felt overwhelmed by the almost-weekly paper assignments. It wasn't fair, some of them said, that I graded them on the essays they wrote before the class discussions, since it was often only after the class discussions that they understood the topic they wrote the essays about.  This time around, I made an extra effort to front-load the idea that the essays are designed to improve the quality of the discussions. If everybody showed up at the discussions without having first tried to write a paper about reader-response theory or semiotics or formalism, then the discussions would not be very useful. 

I did give the students a chance to re-do one of their ten critical theory exercises, and in general the exercises were going so well that I relaxed a little and let the students write a creative hypertext or a letter to the editor if they wanted to. But the rigor of doing a short paper every week, and committing their initial ideas to paper, before showing up in class, really helped develop their critical thinking skills.  By the last week of classes, after I returned their rough drafts of their term papers, I got confident, satisfied smiles from the class.  They knew what they had to do, and they knew they could do it.  It was very rewarding.

That kind of confidence comes only with practice.

A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem.

Today I Die

His ear was severed by a sword wielded by his friend, the painter, Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art. Gauguin lied about the incident and fled, two German art historians now believe. Van Gogh covered up to protect his friend and was placed in a mental institution.

[...]

Nina Zimmer, curator of a large Van Gogh exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basle until September, is unconvinced. "Maybe they are right," she said. "But almost any theory is plausible because there are so few established facts." -- John Lichfield

Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7.  Coding is art, art is code.

As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming language -- a powerful and peculiar one.

Inform 7 gets a lot of attention for its English-like syntax. I'm not going to talk about the natural-language aspects of I7. I'm going to talk about the underlying programming model, the system of rules and rulebooks. That's less attention-grabbing than the flashy syntax; but, in my opinion, it's equally radical. And perhaps a more important development, in the long run.

To be fair, I also like talking about the rule-based programming model because I contributed some of its ideas, back when I7 was first taking shape. I'm not claiming authorship here, mind you. I got into a long and digressive email conversation with Graham Nelson and Emily Short, in which we all threw ideas around, and then Graham went ahead and spent six years developing his ideas. I shoved mine on the shelf.

This means that I will talk about I7 for a while, and then break into a wild flight of "but this is how I think it should be done!" And then finish up with all the reasons I haven't made it work yet. Such is a hacker's life.

Unicorns are much more fun when they move.

It took about two minutes for my daughter to do the drawing, about an hour and a half to make the model (while my daughter played at my feet), and another two hours to make the animation (long after she was in bed).

Fascinating story of a forger who tricked both the Nazis and the Allies. Sounds like a great subject for a non-fiction novel.

Brought in for questioning, van Meegeren refused to give up the name of the painting's rightful owners and was sent to prison on charges of treason, a crime punishable by death. Six weeks on death row and van Meegeren cracked, announcing somewhat histrionically that he'd painting the thing himself. Awkwardly, nobody believed him.-- BoingBoing

My wife can't stand computers, but she's more than an honorary geek because she knows her classic sci-fi. She pegged this scene instantly.

In this re-creation from "The Cage," green-skinned Orion slave girl Vena dances for Captain Pike. Why does Elchesen put in the hours necessary to create such images? "The time involved depends on if I feel like working on my latest creation or not," Elchesen said. "As for the effort, when someone sees it, I want that person to see something that is one of a kind -- never done before."  -- Wired

Remediation of a classic? A satire on visual cruft? http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

A nifty little primer, compiled by Nate Piekos.

 CROSSBAR I
This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An "I" with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, "I." The only other allowable use of the "crossbar I" is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just be the vertical stroke version. Although I would debate it, you occasionally see the "crossbar I" used in the first letter of the first word of a sentence, or the first letter of someone's name.

Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks -- this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class.

Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick's skull in her left hand and read it slowly rotating it to see all the lines; she then passed the Cassaba around and everyone read a line; amazingly, there were exactly 13 circular lines on the melon; she then cut it open with a sharp folding knife of illegal dimensions (on an airplane, certainly) and passed slices that everyone ate like communion, there being present also an eerie, nearly sacerdotal silence. And so it went, fruit after fruit, read, performed, eaten, in an order that could have not been more perfect if Noah's monitors had been there. We thus learned that: a) poetry can be edible (and perhaps it should be); b) fruit is a sexier medium than paper or pixels; c) school could be fun, d) "intermediate" could mean that even though the medium had not been quite reached (advanced), the closeness to experience itself (beginning), made it worthwhile, e) it's not so easy to write on fruit without good magic markers, and f) T.S. Eliot need not be memorized. --Andrei Codrescu, Inside Higher Ed

I made this slide up for a conference presentation a few years ago. (Of course, it applies to the procrastinating professor, too.)

In the past, I have pointed out copy-editing weaknesses at Story Book Forest at Idlewild Park, in southwestern PA.  When I was last there, shortly before Halloween, my son stopped in his tracks and said, "They repainted the Little Miss Muffet Sign!"

And he was right... they repainted some of the signs. Just now, when I was clearing out my camera's SD card, I noticed I had a set of before and after photos. Here's one sign in September 2005:


Here's the same sign in October, 2008.


I must say I rather miss the webbing, and the lettering for "Little Miss Muffet" is almost illegible. (What's the deal with the vines?) The new sign omits the period after "whey," so that the revision is now a run-on sentence. But at least the egregious "besider" error has been fixed.

Via

The FPP -- first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn't chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little... it's so easy to go scary. Still, it's beautiful And it's an XNA-developed title. Interesting.

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

From Wired:

That's the story that's been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books. We choose to ignore the fundamental quality that makes games different and so compelling-- their interactivity.

The other approach is to "open up" Moby Dick, to allow the player real, significant choices in the course of events and their outcomes. In this configuration, an especially skillful player might be so good at the game that he does indeed catch and kill Moby Dick, triumphantly achieving Captain Ahab's revenge-- and along with it, destroying the whole point of Melville's story. Allowing such an alternate ending robs the work of its power; the story of Moby Dick is engaging precisely because Captain Ahab cannot find extra lives, rewind time or load an old save for a second chance, and the story of his obsession and undoing is fixed over time, a static sculpture in four dimensions.

The issue of these changeable outcomes is what the critic Roger Ebert infamously identified as the central problem with games-as-art, and despite the emotional flurries and dismissive grumblings from the gaming community, it is actually a good point without a clear answer. If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab "wins," no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance. Work hard enough, get lucky enough, and anything is possible -- Matthew Wasteland, GameSetWatch

Good editing skills and random, candid video = 2 minutes of awesomeness. This is why I love the internet.

Takes just a tad too long to get started -- give it about 45 seconds before you decide to bail out. You'll be hooked by the second time you see the flip-flops. Via.

"Ah-ah-ah ooh, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah ooh!"  I'll be humming it all week.

The other day at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, I attended a brown bag talk given by my Seton Hill colleague, Maureen Vissat, The Art of the 1940s: Styles and Influences. I had seen her present as part of a series of teaching demonstrations, so I knew her talk would be excellent. She wove interesting details from the lives of notable painters and gallerists to form an informative picture of how art and artists are made, and the dual role of the gallery as archive of what is already established and promoter of the new and innovative. Her slide show included several shots of the gallery spaces, not just close-ups of the paintings or portraits of the artists themselves.

Her talk was timed to coincide with an exhibit of American painters of the 1940s. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a permalink for this gallery, but for the moment, and presumably unitl the exhibit closes in October, there's a description on the current exhibitions page.

[T]his exhibition reconstructs a sampling of the exhibitions of the same title organized by Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Museum of Art) from 1943 to 1949 and includes 48 paintings, of which 42 are the actual works that were selected for exhibitions over the seven-year period. These annual exhibitions of American painting replaced the Institute's annual Carnegie International while it was suspended due to World War II.

I've included thumbnails of some of my favorite paintings below.